Excellent piece written by Ben Smith and published on Medium: Online, each story is at best its own magazine, sent out to find its own temporary audience. One article may absorb people who subscribe, or would once have subscribed, to Foreign Affairs; another might absorb devotees of Wired or Men’s Health or Glamour. The author […]

Posts with the label [I’m Reading] will be about articles I’m finding interesting. I often find things interesting even when I completely disagree with them. No lawyers approved this message. The topic du jour among media pundits and pontificators: the new Glenn Greenwald venture, backed by the considerably deep-pocketed Pierre Omidyar. The best commentary I’ve […]

Media types are all a-twitter about this Seth Godin post, “Principles for Responsible Media Moguls“. So I thought I’d cross-post a piece I wrote in 2011 on transparency in newsrooms. I’m fascinated by the concept of “radical transparency“, though not under the guise of eroding privacy norms. The concept is especially relevant to media organisations and […]

Add this theme to the list of blog-posts-in-my-brain. In short, “sharing” has become a lot easier and a lot more efficient, but “being shared with” has become much more time-consuming, demanding, and inefficient (especially if we don’t ignore most of our friends most of the time). Given this, expecting our friends to keep up with […]

Just look at that graph. On the one hand, you have all the social networks that you know. They’re about 43.5 percent of our social traffic. On the other, you have this previously unmeasured darknet that’s delivering 56.5 percent of people to individual stories. This is not a niche phenomenon! It’s more than 2.5x Facebook’s […]

“it might be worth more — particularly in the long term — to spend the time trying to confirm the reports that emerge through social media (was that tweet really from the niece of Whitney Houston’s hairstylist?) or to push the story beyond the simple report that something has happened and figure out what it means or why it matters. That kind of analysis and context has always been the most long-lasting aspect of journalism, but mainstream media outlets continually get distracted by the need for another scoop or another “exclusive,” something very few non-journalists care about.”

“another VC recently told me his firm recently had passed on opportunities to invest in some new tech blogs that were proposing a business model he described as “hush money.” Potential investors were being offered “most favored nation” status for themselves and their portfolio companies if they put money into the site.
This is what now passes for “journalism” in Silicon Valley: hired guns and reformed click-whores who have found a way to grab some of the loot for themselves. This is perhaps not surprising. Silicon Valley once was home to scientists and engineers — people who wanted to build things. Then it became a casino. Now it is being turned into a silicon cesspool, an upside-down world filled with spammers, liars, flippers, privacy invaders, information stealers — and their grubby cadre of paid apologists and pygmy hangers-on.”

Most of what is written about the tech world — both in blog form and old school media form — is bullshit. I won’t try to put some arbitrary label on it like 80%, but it’s a lot. There’s more bullshit than there is 100% pure, legitimate information.

The problem is systemic. Print circulation is dying and pageviews are all that matter in keeping advertisers happy. This means, whether writers like it or not, there’s an underlying drive for both sensationalism and more — more — more.